


Jigsaw Dynamics

by Kiranokira



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Background Phichit Chulanont/Seung-gil Lee, M/M, Meeting the Parents, Meeting the Parents of Your Living Legend Fiancé Anxiety, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 09:03:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16829419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiranokira/pseuds/Kiranokira
Summary: Viktor's father shakes the bottle to indicate that it’s empty, and his wife's small pout is so reminiscent of Viktor that Yuuri says, “Vitya, you look a lot like your mother.”He’s definitely drunk, because he didn’t mean to say that out loud.Nor does he mean to say or do anything he says and does afterward.





	Jigsaw Dynamics

**Author's Note:**

> So I've posted nine fics for YOI so far, and I started this one before any of them, waaaay back in January of 2017. I wrote about 70% of it, then I let it languish for almost two years while I wrote other stuff including two novel-length fics about the romance between Phichit and Seung-gil. :D
> 
> With Adolescence set to be released sometime in 2019, I figured I better finish and post this fic about Yuuri meeting the parents I made up for Viktor before their existences and personalities are totally retconned by canon. (I'm so excited to see literally anything about Viktor's upbringing EEE. MORE CANON INFO! MORE CANON INFO!)
> 
> Please enjoy, even if you happen to stumble upon this in The Future after the movie's been released and all of this is wrong. \:D/

An absent, “Yuuri, would you come with me to Lyon?” is how it starts.

•

On their way there, Yuuri and Viktor stay overnight in Paris. Back when they booked the tickets, Viktor claimed it was so they could rest and adjust to the time difference, but now Yuuri suspects it was more so that Viktor could live out his favorite parts of the animated movie _Anastasia_.

Viktor all but confirms this theory in the morning when he opens Instagram and uploads an unexpectedly tasteful assortment of photos from their Parisian date the night before with the tag #togetherinparis. Then Viktor chucks his phone onto the bed next to Yuuri’s arm with a triumphant giggle and sashays with an invisible partner into the bathroom for a shower.

Yuuri watches the likes and comments accumulate with a low groan.

Almost immediately, Yuri posts a comment with a critique on the hashtag. [You know that message was between her and her GRANDMOTHER, don’t you?]

Seven minutes later, he adds: [That movie is stupid and disrespectful and inaccurate. And stupid.]

Yuuri smiles, feeling a tug behind his ribs. It’s been two weeks since he and Viktor left St. Petersburg, and he feels keenly the absence of his adopted rinkmates. Judging by the frequency of Yuri’s text messages as well as comments across several forms of social media, Yuuri isn’t alone in this feeling.

While Viktor indulges in one of his especially long showers, Yuuri picks up Viktor’s phone—since Viktor isn’t here to see him blush—unlocks it with a press of his thumbprint, and opens the photo gallery.

He’s satisfied to confirm that most of the photos Viktor opted against including in his post are more intimate shots. There are several photos of them getting ready in their hotel room at various stages of undress, mostly with Yuuri pulling on clothes in the background while Viktor poses for selfies. There’s one blurry shot of Yuuri in the cab with his head on Viktor’s shoulder, smiling up at the camera, and then an even blurrier selfie of Viktor trying to kiss Yuuri’s forehead and laughing because Yuuri’s giving him a deeply amused grin. Seventeen shots follow of Yuuri just standing on the grand staircase of the ballet theater, completely unaware of the camera.

Yuuri sinks into the pillows, his face heating up as he flips quickly through them. It’s not even a good angle. He looks ridiculous, staring at the ceiling of the The Palais Garnier like he’s never seen the inside of a building before.

Why would Viktor want to immortalize him looking like that?

It's a persistent source of mild bewilderment for Yuuri that when it comes to Viktor, the curiosities still outnumber the certainties. Despite the central role Viktor’s played in Yuuri’s life, first as an idol, then as a hero, and now as a coach and…significantly more than that, Yuuri’s still getting to know Viktor as a person. Still adjusting to this multifaceted Viktor Nikiforov who sees Yuuri, knows Yuuri, and even seems to _admire_ Yuuri.

When Viktor emerges from the bathroom in a fluffy white robe, he’s stretching his arms out behind him and humming something unfamiliar. Yuuri turns over in bed to face him and gives him a small, tentative smile.

“Are you going to have us reenact every movie you like?” he teases, his voice still sleep-rough.

Viktor laughs. He drops back into bed and rests his head on Yuuri’s pillow, very deliberately touching the tips of their noses together. “Only the ones whose music I skated to,” he whispers in slow, broken Japanese. He tosses in a wink and a kiss to both cheeks.

Yuuri recalls the entire history of Viktor’s programs in an instant and snorts. “I say ‘no’ right now to any part of Flashdance,” he says in English.

Viktor frowns, his gaze sliding off to the side. “Flashd—huh. I was…?”

“Sixteen,” Yuuri says, because the smug fanboy inside him can’t shut up even at the cost of his remaining pride.

Viktor gives him a slow, horrifically amused smile, the one that makes an appearance whenever he remembers that adolescent Yuuri had such a crush on him that Viktor might have been Yuuri’s sexual awakening (and Yuuri is never, ever going to confirm that yes, in fact, he was).

“Yuuri,” Viktor says warmly, “you are so—”

Yuuri moans and struggles out of the blankets. “Stop, stop, I’m going to take a shower!”

He shuts the door behind him with a sigh and when Viktor laughs, he locks it. Viktor doesn’t get to see him amused as well.

•

The long-awaited tempest of panic that Yuuri’s been expecting arrives just as their train departs for Lyon. It occurs to him that another reason Viktor gave them last night was to help relax Yuuri's nerves, so it gives Yuuri a healthy dose of guilt when he can feel for himself that it didn’t work and he’s still terrified.

Yuuri’s family embraced Viktor quickly in spite of a lack of fluent communication and, arguably, familiarity. They knew Viktor Nikiforov as the foreign skater in Yuuri’s posters, but they definitely didn’t retain any of the information from Yuuri’s passionate lectures about Viktor over the years.

When Viktor himself first appeared in their lives, the Katsuki family met him first as a customer and then grew to think of him as the quirky foreigner who believed enough in their son to travel across the world and live in a formal dining room purely to resurrect Yuuri’s career.

Viktor’s parents, on the other hand, are a massive, foreboding question mark.

After thirty minutes of silence between them, Viktor rests his head on Yuuri’s shoulder and sighs, “Japan’s trains are better, aren’t they? I miss ordering a lunch set from the cart lady.”

When Yuuri doesn’t say anything, Viktor peeks up at him through his fringe with an eyebrow arched.

Yuuri exhales a laugh and strokes Viktor’s hair from his face so he can kiss his forehead. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Have I been weird? I’m sorry I’m not talking.”

Viktor’s smile softens his expression. “It’s fine,” he says, pushing his fingers between Yuuri’s. “I just had the thought and decided to share. That’s all.”

Yuuri nods and squeezes Viktor’s hand.

Viktor then apparently decides it’s a good time to point out, “I knew nothing about your parents when I met them, you know.”

“Viktor,” Yuuri groans. He lets his head drop forward for a second, then he shifts until Viktor draws back and folds his arms with his lips pursed. Undaunted, Yuuri presents his counterpoints one by one on his fingers. “We weren’t dating when you met them, you’re _you_ , and my parents aren’t the parents of _Viktor Nikiforov_.”

“That’s true,” Viktor says, deceptively innocuous. He leans so close that Yuuri’s transfixed by the vibrant beauty of his irises. “They’re the parents of _Katsuki Yuuri_.”

He says Yuuri’s name with the same reverence that Yuuri used for Viktor’s—which is ridiculous—but Yuuri has learned not to argue when Viktor decides to be aggressively wonderful to him. Viktor has proved time and again that he can make Yuuri blush whenever he wants and he'll likely have that skill for the rest of their lives and in all future ones hereafter. So Yuuri chooses to retreat instead, tucking his face against Viktor’s neck and grumbling at him in Japanese so heavily Kyushu-accented that Viktor won’t have a hope of understanding him.

Viktor’s warm laugh is just loud enough to reach Yuuri’s ears.

In the pause that follows, Yuuri senses that Viktor is building up to a question, which turns out to be, “Yuuri, what did you mean by ‘you’re you’?”

Ah.

Yuuri breathes in the scent of the softening oil Viktor’s been using on his hair lately, considering carefully which words he should use to explain this in English. “You’re good with people,” he murmurs at last. “You know how to make them love you.” Before Viktor can let loose in defense of Yuuri against Yuuri himself, he continues, “You have a good heart, and you’re not afraid of showing it to people.”

That’s one of many things Yuuri’s come to admire about Viktor as a person: he may have moments of capriciousness and selfishness, but Viktor’s heart was made to awe people, and that has made him both a magnificent performer and one of the few heroes in the world who will never let a fan down.

Yuuri expects the silence that follows; Viktor gets thoughtful whenever Yuuri manages to choose the right words to describe what he’s feeling. While Viktor rubs his thumb in small circles on the back of Yuuri’s hand, Yuuri takes in the scenery of the French countryside and tries to keep his mind off making a good first impression on his fiancé’s parents.

His famous…gorgeous…record-breaking…Olympian…fiancé’s…parents.

Yuuri’s never had an actual panic attack before, but it won’t surprise him if the hoofbeats he feels on the inside of his forehead turn out to be a precursor.

“We’re just different,” Viktor says just above a whisper, touching his lips to Yuuri’s hair.

Yuuri closes his eyes and enjoys the sensation. He suspects that’s not the end of Viktor’s thought, so he doesn’t say anything.

“Saying I’m ‘good with people’ is too general to mean anything,” Viktor continues. “Besides, I have my bad sides, too. You might’ve seen one once.”

Yuuri smiles. “Maybe,” he concedes.

“You’re good with people in a different way,” Viktor says, and ignores the skeptical noise Yuuri makes. “You may not be naturally charming or charismatic—”

“Thank you,” Yuuri says before he can stop himself. “This is making me feel great.”

“—But you have a…good heart.”

“That’s _not_ general?”

“Well, I was going to say ‘pure,’” Viktor says, “but I thought you’d make another rude noise at me. You’re complex, Yuuri. _You_ know all the moments in your life that you’re ashamed of. _You_ know how many times you’ve failed to live up to your goals. But you have to remember that the rest of the world sees you as you are now, and we see more good than bad. I hardly ever see the bad, to be honest.”

Yuuri hasn’t really stopped blushing since they started this conversation, but suddenly it feels as if he’s never truly experienced the sensation until now.

“Of course,” Viktor says, his tone lifted into a practically jovial pitch, “we _are_ only newly engaged, so I’m sure that’ll change with time.”

“Oh,” Yuuri says.

“But I’ll always admire you, Yuuri.” Viktor turns Yuuri’s hand over and slides his fingers between Yuuri’s. “You’re not cynical about the world, you don’t take advantage of others when you could—you’re tenacious, devoted, loyal…and Yurio adores you, which is no small feat. That will always be impressive to me. If Yurio didn’t like you, I’m not sure I would have stayed in Japan. It’s like having a pet’s approval.”

Yuuri can tell he’s joking, but he still brings Viktor’s hand to his lips, grazing the smooth edge of the ring Viktor once described to a reporter as “the gold of which I'm proudest.” Everything Viktor is saying is sweet and perfect, but if Viktor’s point is that they’re different but equal, Yuuri knows he’ll never be convinced of that.

So he decides to say only, “Thank you,” and let it lie.

“Would it help to hear more about my parents?” Viktor asks. “I know I haven’t said much about them, but I promise it’s not because they’re bad people. I just have more memories of other people, I guess.”

That’s an odd thing to say, but Yuuri doesn’t tell him that. “I think that might help,” he says instead.

Some skaters—like JJ—can’t avoid having their family pulled into the limelight with them. But despite years of loyal translating and web scouring and forum-crawling, Yuuri’s never been able to find any concrete information on Viktor’s family. He was starting to suspect they might be dead when Viktor suggested flying to Lyon so Yuuri could meet them.

Viktor turns in his seat to face Yuuri more directly and explains that his mother has become fascinated with hunting down old photos of her hometown. Over the next ten minutes, everything of consequence that Yuuri gleans from Viktor’s airy stories is that his parents are 1) Russian, 2) living in France, and 3) human.

Viktor, it turns out, is Bad at talking about his family.

All Yuuri can do now is speculate. The comfort Viktor has with money, for example, suggests a luxurious upbringing, but that doesn’t really say anything about his parents personally. Yuuri’s met plenty of rich people through figure skating and most of them are very unique in personality. Guang Hong’s family is wealthy, and Guang Hong himself wears top-of-the-line everything, but he’s fairly grounded and approachable as a person. Seung-gil’s family, according to Phichit, has enough money to buy all of Saga if they wanted to, but you’d never guess that from Seung-gil’s fashion choices or…anything else about him, really.

They might be snobbish about the clothing brands they wear, like Viktor and Chris can be, or they might value function over fashion like Seung-gil.

Maybe they’re not the level of wealthy that Guang Hong’s and Seung-gil’s families are. Maybe they have inherited wealth, or maybe they made it themselves.

Maybe they’re not rich at all and Viktor’s just…Viktor.

“—Ah, and I guess many people say I’m like my father, but I don’t really see the similarities, honestly—“

What Yuuri wants to hear are flaws. Just to make these strangers more approachable in his mind. But even thinking that feels rude.

Besides, what if Yuuri asks and Viktor tells him that his mother hates Japanese people? What if they’re absolutely lovely, but they’re just as forgetful as Viktor is and still think Viktor’s dating…whoever he was dating before Yuuri forced his way into the picture.

Maybe Viktor’s parents made a strong connection with Viktor’s last boyfriend.

Who even _was_ Viktor’s last boyfriend? The tabloid reporters could never get a good shot at him, but he was around Viktor’s height and most fans suspected one of Chris’s French actor friends.

No one’s even _mentioned_ him to Yuuri, and maybe that’s strange.

He definitely wasn’t a skater, that’s for sure. Maybe before Yuuri, Viktor only dated models and actors and his parents will look at Yuuri with polite disbelief the whole time they’re in Lyon and—

“Yuuri, you’re pale,” Viktor says.

“I’m a winter athlete,” Yuuri says. “I’m always pale.”

“I’m sure you know those two things aren’t connected.”

There's a moment of stillness between them, then Viktor says, “They’re nice,” for what must be the dozenth time, exasperated affection clear in his tone. “And I told you, they already like you. They’ve seen all the videos I’ve linked them to. They said you’re very passionate and handsome and—”

“Please stop,” Yuuri says, shielding his face with both his free hand _and_ the one still gripping Viktor’s. “I’m not the same in person as I am on the ice and in interviews. You know that.”

Viktor gently tugs on the hand Yuuri’s got in a vice until Yuuri uncovers his face.

“You’re going to faint if you keep this up,” Viktor tells him.

Yuuri makes a strangled sound. “I’m going to the bathroom,” he says, his eyes darting up to see which end of the car he has to walk to.

Viktor lets him go, trailing his fingertips along Yuuri’s forearm as Yuuri steps over his legs to get into the aisle.

The farther Yuuri walks, the more embarrassed he gets. He _knows_ he’s making a big deal out of nothing. He hasn’t heard much about Viktor’s parents, but Viktor clearly loves them and he’s sworn over and over that they’re similar to Yuuri’s parents in a lot of ways, only a little different—which, Yuuri realizes with frustration as he remembers it, is _also_ no help at all.

He uses the restroom and washes his hands afterward, but he avoids his reflection in the mirror. He stops in the loud area between cars and leans on the door to watch the scenery pass by, relieved to have some time to himself, to fantasize about hiding among the luggage until the train goes back to Paris. He rubs his stomach, but the nauseated feeling doesn’t diminish.

The sunlight has warmed the pane of glass under his arm, so Yuuri leans his temple against it and exhales, emptying his lungs as much as he can before pulling in a steady breath to fill them again.

The first time Viktor ever spoke of his parents, they were in Hasetsu, and Yuuri hadn’t really been listening. He’d been focused on the Rostelecom Cup, his muscles tense and his thoughts knotted up in retirement and Viktor’s imminent departure and the bleak future he would have to carve out without him. Now that he thinks back on it, he can’t even remember the story Viktor told him, but he thinks it was meant to be funny. Viktor had sounded put out when Yuuri didn’t laugh, at least.

The car door slides open and Yuuri doesn’t look, not sure whether or not he wants it to be Viktor. When he draws his gaze back from the haze of green outside, he sees Viktor bracing his shoulder on the window opposite him, facing Yuuri with an apologetic look on his face. Yuuri dredges up a wan smile for him.

“Sorry,” he murmurs. “I’m being—”

Viktor shakes his head and hugs him, cradling the back of Yuuri’s head with one hand and rubbing his lower back with the other. “Shh. You don’t have to say anything. I just missed you.”

Yuuri’s eyes smart as he relaxes in Viktor’s arms, leaning against his chest with a sigh. When he felt like this as a child, he’d hide. If anyone found him by chance, his family knew to pretend they’d seen nothing and leave him alone. Yuuri’s always felt grateful to them for that. They’d comfort him some other way later, through gestures like an extra portion at dinner or rice crackers left on a plate by his bedroom door. They respected his need to escape for a while.

He’s still that person now. The only difference is that Viktor has become one of his hiding places.

He smiles more fully and takes in the cloying sweetness of Viktor’s coconut-infused cologne. The T-shirt Viktor’s wearing cost more than Yuuri’s skates, and the fabric whispers over Yuuri’s skin as he brushes his cheek against it, seeking Viktor’s heat.

After a moment, Viktor wonders aloud, “We’re not codependent, are we?”

“Yes,” Yuuri says. “But I think we wear it well.”

Viktor exhales a laugh against his ear and squeezes him closer.

•

Viktor navigates through Gare de la Part-Dieu with ease, but Yuuri can’t predict the ebb and flow of the crowd nearly as well and lags behind. He finds himself so focused on keeping sight of Viktor that he outpaces his nerves entirely, leaving them in the tangle of harried travelers until he’s breached the station exit and hears Viktor call, “Papa!”

Yuuri can’t decide if the man waiting for them on the curb is exactly or nothing like the person he expected, but it’s immediately clear which of his parents Viktor inherited his buoyancy from. “Vitya!”

Yuuri watches both men embrace and spin in a half-circle, laughing uproariously as if finding each other in front of the train station at exactly the time and place they arranged to meet is the funniest coincidence to have ever occurred in the history of coincidences.

Viktor parts from his father with a bright, boyish grin and says, “Hello, Papa,” in Russian.

“Ah, Vitya,” his father says, holding Viktor tightly by the arms. Yuuri’s fascinated to see the man’s eyes watering. “You look well.” He continues speaking, but Yuuri’s Russian isn’t strong enough yet to keep up. He stands back at a polite distance, his throat and legs itching with the urge to scream and run respectively.

Viktor laughs, delighted by whatever his father’s told him, and he stretches his arm out to Yuuri. “Papa, this is my fiancé,” he says in English.

Yuuri wheels his bag over, extra focused on physical coordination so he doesn’t do something horrible like trip and headbutt the man’s armor-like torso. “Hello, sir,” he says.

Viktor’s father's eyes are full of warmth. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Yuuri.” He takes Yuuri’s outstretched hand and adds, “Congratulations on your gold. We watched the streaming video.”

Yuuri’s face burns fourteen degrees hotter. “Thank you, sir,” he says.

“Please,” the man says, his face transforming into feigned solemnity, “I very like it if you call me Ilya.”

Yuuri nods, too nervous to smile back—“Okay, sir”—or use his first name.

Viktor’s arm slides around his waist, anchoring him, and Ilya brightens up, clapping Viktor on the shoulder. “We’ll call a cab, yes?” As he leads them to the taxi stand, he continues speaking over his shoulder. “My wife is making lunch—Yelena. Beautiful name, yes? Do you like sandwiches, Yuuri? We have a little garden, and we grow our own cucumbers and arugula for two years. The cucumbers are very crisp, very fresh, but the arugula…ah, it’s only okay. It’s better, though, slowly! Maybe you help, eh, Vitya? Ha!”

Words continue spilling out of the man as if he's trying to fit ten years of conversation into ten minutes. When Yuuri peers up at Viktor, wide-eyed, Viktor lifts a shoulder and smiles.

•

In the cab, while Viktor’s father chats in French with the driver—a friend of his, it seems—Yuuri turns his focus to breathing. He’s nearly got the hang of it when Viktor smirks and shows Yuuri his phone’s screen. After skimming, Yuuri lets out a quiet huff of laughter. It appears that Yuri’s fans have gone berserk over Yuri’s Anastasia comments.

In the three hours since Viktor posted his collage, the Yuri’s Angels page on Instagram has uploaded seven new posts, all featuring Yuri’s head photoshopped on different screencaps of Anastasia’s love interest, Dimitri. Predictably, the eponymous character’s face has been replaced with Otabek’s.

“He might murder you,” Yuuri says.

“It’s his own fault,” Viktor says, his smirk growing.

An English message from Yuri pops up on Yuuri’s phone.

[Take his phone away.]

Before Yuuri can even finish unlocking his screen, another message from Yuri has popped up on Viktor’s, this time in Russian.

[Это ваша вина]

Viktor snickers and writes back something equally pithy.

Yuuri sends off a response ([Your fans are really good with Photoshop]) and then pockets his phone so he can stare at the sun-soaked scenery of Lyon in the early afternoon. The buildings sit jammed together in strict rows, separated by paths of dark interlocking cobblestones. The cafés with their wicker chairs and dressed tables remind him of that December afternoon they spent wandering the side streets of Barcelona.

Ilya bellows, “Yuuri!” and three years of Yuuri’s life fall away.

“Yes, sir?”

Ilya turns in the passenger’s seat, laughing, and waves his hand. “Ilya, Ilya!” he booms.

“Sorry—Ilya,” Yuuri says. The overfamiliarity of rankles.

Viktor's shoulders quake with silent laughter, so Yuuri pinches his thigh until Viktor stops and pretends innocence.

“How far into your wedding planning are you?”

Yuuri blinks. “Um—”

“So far, we've both planned to be there,” Viktor says cheerfully.

Ilya’s mouth forms a smile so similar to Yuuri’s mother’s that it sends a wave of fondness through Yuuri’s chest. “Your mother will not like that answer, Vitya,” Ilya says. “Maybe think of something better before she asks you.”

While Viktor sighs in exasperation, Yuuri tries to imagine Viktor’s mother, the person who married Ilya and helped raise Viktor. According to Viktor, she's nice, and from what Yuuri’s gathered in the last ten minutes from Ilya, she cooks, she might garden, she likes to be organized, and she’s probably the parent who did more of the management side of childrearing. Unfortunately for Yuuri, what he knows of her isn’t informative enough to create a reassuring picture for himself.

“We need to focus on the ice shows next,” Viktor tells his father. “Once that's past—“

“Then it'll be time to prepare for the Grand Prix again,” Yuuri says in an undertone, a point he's made every time they've tried to talk about wedding logistics.

Viktor seems to think their wedding should be elaborate and ostentatious and perfect and somehow brought into existence through the power of magic and hope and vision boards. All of Yuuri’s attempts to force Viktor to sit down with him and plan any detail of the ceremony at all has resulted in a mild pout at best and at worst, Viktor flopping himself over the edge of whatever he happens to be sitting on and actually whining like a five-year-old.

“You could elope,” Ilya says as the taxi driver pulls the car to the side of the road.

“Elope?” Viktor cries, scandalized. “Papa!”

Ilya doesn't answer, busy handing too many bills to the driver and refusing the change he's offered in return. From what Yuuri’s seen so far of the country, France doesn’t seem to practice tipping culture, but Ilya is cheerfully insistent. He’d probably be one of those foreign guests at Yu-topia Katsuki who tips even though Japan doesn’t have a tipping culture either, and Yuuri's fondness for the man grows.

The driver helps haul their bags out of the trunk and Ilya lifts the heavier of Viktor’s like it’s filled with feathers. He has more bulk than Viktor, centered mostly in his chest and shoulders, and he exudes vibrancy and energy with his every movement.

Viktor laughs as his father tries and fails to lift their bags in front of him in a stack like he’s carrying schoolbooks. He laughs even harder when his father overbalances and drops all of them with a squawk. After his help is refused, Yuuri actually takes in the house they’re about to enter, his breath barely skittering out at the immensity and grandiose beauty of it. He supposes European architecture will always seem to him like something taken out of a Disney movie.

“Fifth floor!” Ilya says, clapping Yuuri's back. “Sorry. No elevator. Kidding! Ha!”

Yuuri gives Viktor a tiny smile as Ilya marches up the front steps with two of Viktor’s bags, humming something merry. Viktor, burdened with just his carry-on, sneaks in and kisses Yuuri's temple.

“You're good?” Viktor murmurs, eyebrows sneaking up a bit with concern.

Yuuri nods. He’s surprised by how honest it feels.

As they crowd into the elevator, playing a small game of Tetris with the rolling bags, Ilya says, “You two gentlemen will be in the second bedroom. The ceiling is like this,” he slants his arm diagonally, “which I don’t like, but our last guests said they don’t mind it so much. There’s a skylight, so it’s bright for the daytime, but we have face masks if it bothers you in the morning. We need a curtain—maybe you help with that, Vitya? If you feel maybe claustrophobic up there, please to come down to the sitting room.”

The elevator door opens on the fifth floor and Yuuri steps quickly into the hallway with his bag to give Ilya and Viktor space to maneuver the rest of the luggage into the hallway. Ilya continues, “We have books, we have TV—we also have a fireplace! But of course it’s a little useless in July, yes? You have your bathroom upstairs, so no need for worry there. Very private for guests. Here we are! You go ahead, Yuuri.”

Opening the door to the apartment invites a swell of rich aromas that bring to mind soups and sauces more than sandwiches, and Yuuri’s stomach curls in on itself with sudden hunger pangs.

“Yelena, my love!” Ilya calls in Russian. He drops one of Viktor’s bags to the floor with a thump and cups his hands around his mouth. “Love of my life, air in my lungs—” and one more that Yuuri doesn't catch but he thinks is another organ. Kidney? Gallbladder?

“There’s no resemblance between you two at all,” Yuuri tells Viktor quietly in Japanese.

Viktor gives him a wry smile as he shuts the front door behind him. “Sarcasm sounds crass in a language that never uses it,” he replies equally quietly in English.

“We use it,” Yuuri says, staying with Japanese. “But it’s subtle, so I can understand how foreigners might miss it.”

Viktor seems to let this slide, but as a woman in a wheelchair rolls into the room, his hand darts out and squeezes the most ticklish spot on Yuuri’s side. The noise Yuuri makes launches this moment up to number three on his list of most mortifying first impressions.

Viktor’s mother seems unruffled, her expression as placid as her husband’s is radiant. She’s dressed so elegantly it strikes Yuuri for the first time how casual Ilya’s clothes are. His brown cable-knit sweater is so old and well-loved it’s almost shapeless, and the green of his trousers is worn to a pastel shade at the knees. His wife, meanwhile, seems to share Viktor’s devotion to brand names, though Yuuri can’t confidently identify the makers of her tapered, cream-colored blouse or flowing, sky blue skirt.

Viktor bends down and kisses his mother on each cheek, a gesture that coaxes a warm smile from her.

“It’s good to have you here,” she says in flawless English, reaching up and squeezing Viktor's wrist. That one sentence sends Yuuri’s mind into a tempest of curiosity. There isn’t a trace of Russian sneaking behind her words—she could have been born and raised somewhere in England for all that she sounds like a native.

Yuuri startles when she glances at him past Viktor's hip. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Yuuri,” she says. She extends a hand that he hesitantly moves a step forward to take.

“Hello, ma’am,” Yuuri says, hedging his bets that she won’t want him to call her Yelena. When her comfortable smile widens and creases the corners of her eyes, Yuuri realizes that Viktor inherited both traits from her.

Viktor rests his hand proudly on the back of Yuuri’s neck. “Isn’t he perfect?” he asks his mother. His voice is barely even an attempt at interrogative.

“Viktor,” Yuuri chides quietly, his ears smoking with embarrassment. There’s a time and place for that kind of talk, and it’s never and nowhere.

As Ilya laughs, Viktor's mother gives her son an exasperated look. “He’s lovely, Vitya. But his virtues are clear enough without your help.”

The burst of startled emotion in Yuuri’s chest warms him to his fingertips and toes. For a solid three seconds, Yelena is his favorite person in the room.

Viktor, meanwhile, has the grace to look sheepish, so Yuuri rubs the small of his back to show he’s forgiven.

•

Lunch is courtesy of Ilya, who slices up thin strips from three long baguettes and puts together a dizzyingly varied assortment of pinchos. Viktor assists him by tasting each new combination as it appears before him and announcing a score out of an arbitrary maximum of two hundred points. Yuuri allows himself to be dragged into the game only after Ilya laughs and joins in by loudly ranking his own creations in the three and four hundreds. Yuuri gamely gives every combination a score between one hundred ninety and two hundred, and he doesn’t sway from his grading curve even when Viktor and Ilya pout at him for his obvious diplomacy.

In the meantime, Yelena sets the dining room table and tells Yuuri and Viktor to relocate there for a full meal rather than nibble on snacks at the crowded island. “We’ll finish the soup,” she says. “You two go sit.”

Yuuri offers to lend them a hand, accustomed to subtle hints from his mother to assist in meal prep, but both of Viktor’s parents turn him down with laughter. When Yuuri hesitates by the door, Ilya thrashes a dishrag at him and insists, “Go sit, go sit!”

Viktor pulls a chair out for Yuuri with a playful grin. When Yuuri sinks into it, sighing, Viktor leans down and kisses his cheek. “It was sweet of you to try,” he whispers.

The apartment Viktor’s parents live in is by far the most beautiful and elegantly-decorated home Yuuri’s ever been in. While no single object jumps out at him as particularly expensive, there’s something about the bold burgundy walls and glass doors and the way the walls curve at their junctures rather than end in points that give the impression of wealth. Not to mention the two wide dining room windows that look out directly over the crowded square. An apartment this ideally-located must have cost a mint.

However, it isn’t the blaring flagrancy of money that intrigues Yuuri, but rather how uncomfortable Viktor seems to be surrounded by it. Yuuri knows how much Viktor receives every month from sponsorships and multi-year contracts; he knows the price of the A Diciannoveventitre shoes Viktor casually bought Yuuri in Paris last night; he knows how much Viktor pays in rent every month for the apartment he barely used at all last year—and yet, Viktor doesn’t seem to want to rest his elbows on the table and winces when the legs of his chair scrape the hardwood floor.

Despite Ilya’s warm reception and his mother’s fond chiding, Viktor seems far more ill at ease than Yuuri, if only when he thinks Yuuri isn’t paying attention to him.

Meanwhile Viktor’s parents endear themselves to Yuuri more and more by the minute. Ilya is the clear ruler of the kitchen, dancing with effervescent joy from surface to surface to chop and measure and pour in turn. Somewhere in the midst of his rushing about, he turns on music and sings along to every song with cheerful abandon regardless of whether or not he knows the words. “La dada, your eyes, your eyes, dadadeeda lala _loo!_ Sing with me, _pchelka!_ ” he cries, holding out a wooden spoon before his wife’s nose.

“La la la,” Viktor’s mother says, distracted by the fresh thyme she’s mincing at a low section of the countertop. She says something biting to her husband in Russian, but Ilya only snickers and says, “Yes, okay,” in English.

“What did she say?” Yuuri asks Viktor.

Viktor blinks as if he’s been drawn slowly out of a daydream. “Mm? Oh. She said, ‘If you forget to use these herbs again, I’ll pour them in your hair.’”

Yuuri grins. Viktor’s mother seems content to leave the majority of the cooking to her husband, only moving in to take care of the details he’s forgotten like adding garlic to the broth simmering on the stove and turning off the timer when it blares and replacing the ladle in Ilya’s hand with a wooden spoon. It reminds Yuuri eerily of how Viktor acts when Yuuri cooks, hovering just outside Yuuri’s field of vision and picking up on the details in the recipe that Yuuri’s overlooked.

He thinks of mentioning as much to Viktor, but Viktor seems withdrawn again, peering out the window without really focusing.

Not for the first time and likely not the last, Yuuri realizes how little he truly knows of Viktor’s life outside skating. He can’t think of a single public article or interview or anecdote that included Viktor’s private life beyond Makkachin, and the more Yuuri sees of Viktor’s parents, how _real_ and _personable_ they are, the more he finds that unusual.

In the kitchen, Ilya blocks Viktor’s mother from approaching the counter. “Wait, wait,” he says in English. He holds an arm out as she tries to grab the tray their soup bowls are all sitting on.

She sighs and, also in English, says, “Stop fussing over details that don’t matter to anyone but you.”

“ _Don’t matter!_ Of course the details matter, my love! Vitya and Yuuri will take photos and put them up on the Instagram! Right, boys?”

Viktor says, “That’s right, Papa,” in Russian, his tone suddenly warm and cheerful.

Viktor’s mother relents, folding her arms and watching as Ilya triumphantly dusts the surface of each soup bowl with freshly ground pepper.

Yuuri makes sure to take several photos of his bowl, even as the scent tears through him and rakes at his empty stomach. When he looks up, Ilya winks at him and presents a thumbs up. Beside Yuuri, Viktor uploads a shot of his soup without comment or tags, just a single smiling emoji.

While they eat, Ilya asks about Paris and Viktor promptly unlocks his phone to show him photos. Before Yuuri can object, knowing some of the more intimate shots Viktor has on there, Yelena asks, "Yuuri, I think I read that you lived in the States for a while?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Yuuri says, half of his attention on trying to parse the rapid-fire Russian Viktor’s using. “I studied and—ah, trained in Detroit.”

She nods as she blows steam from the creamy broth in her spoon. “So you speak English, Japanese…?”

“That’s all,” he says, knowing better than to include Russian in that list. He doesn’t want to go near admitting any kind of proficiency, even though he suspects Viktor won’t be able to resist—

“He’s learning Russian, too!”

Yuuri scowls at him, but Viktor looks so dazzlingly proud of him that he can't hold the expression for long. In moments like this, when Viktor's adoration is at its zenith, Yuuri’s annoyance has the same chances as a wisp of smoke against a tornado.

Ilya asks Yuuri something in rapid-fire Russian that goes far over Yuuri’s head. It makes Viktor laugh and Viktor's mother smile wryly.

“Please ignore him,” she advises Yuuri. “It’s been the saving grace of my marriage for thirty-six years.”

“Ach, turtledove,” Ilya says in Russian, sounding wounded. He hands Viktor’s phone back and reaches for his wife’s hand on his other side. “You know I was only joking,” Ilya says in English, theatrically apologetic. “Forgive me, Yuuri. Mischief has always been my downfall.”

Viktor’s mother smiles, allowing her husband to hold her fingers and kiss the knuckles. “It has,” she confirms.

Yuuri takes notes.

•

The first day, they decide, will be a time of true relaxation. Naps, maybe a movie in the sitting room later, and a stroll around the city after dinner when the sun has set.

Ilya takes control of the kitchen, firmly barring Yuuri from the sink. “I have an affinity for washing dishes,” he says in Russian, grinning. Then, in English, “Did you understand?”

Yuuri blushes. “You like washing the dishes?”

Ilya lets out a jubilant bark of laughter and ruffles his hair. “Viktor, this boy is a genius!” he shouts in Russian.

“I know!” Viktor calls back from the bedroom upstairs, sounding equally joyful.

Yuuri desperately reminds himself that Ilya has no way of knowing that Yuuri only knows the Russian for “I have an affinity for” because Viktor uses it often and has yet to finish the sentence around Yuuri in a non-sexual way. He barely escapes the kitchen with his nerves intact, warmth overfilling him at his core from the praise. He hurries up the stairs and finds Viktor unpacking their clothes, setting them on the foot of the guest bed. Yuuri scans the space around them and realizes that not only is there no door, the second floor is one open plan area. The guest bedroom segues smoothly into a library with a skylight on the ceiling and a hole in the floor that looks directly over the sitting room below.

Yuuri leans on the railing and peers down at the sofa where Viktor's mother is tidying up an assortment of bills on the coffee table. He exhales to the soft piano music from the sitting room speakers, the clinking of plates in the kitchen, and the rushing traffic from the street outside.

They’re far kinder than Yuuri let himself hope they’d be, and now he regrets letting Viktor see how afraid he was to meet them. Before he can stop himself, he wonders if they could tell he was reluctant to make the trip. He thinks over every word he said and expression he made, his chest in knots.

“ _Yuu_ ri, did you pack my phone charger? I thought I put it in this bag but—”

Yuuri crosses the room and hugs Viktor firmly around the waist, pressing his cheek against his back. He waits until Viktor's warm fingertips rub into the back of his hand to relax.

“They’re nice, yeah?” Viktor says.

Yuuri nods, smiling. He kisses the spot he likes best, right between Viktor's shoulder blades, then rests his forehead there.

Viktor laces their fingers and squeezes. “I wouldn’t have brought you here if I wasn’t sure they’d be nice to you,” he whispers. “You mean everything to me, you know that.”

Yuuri pinches his eyes shut. “Don’t make me cry on our first day here, please,” he murmurs.

Viktor laughs and turns in his arms, smoothing both hands through Yuuri’s hair. For a moment, Yuuri allows himself the peace of mind to enjoy the little things he notices in the stillness between them: Viktor’s breath warming his ear, Viktor’s hand petting the back of his neck, Viktor’s chest expanding against his.

“Do you want to take a nap?” Viktor asks.

Yuuri takes a breath, thinks of the jetlag due to hit him sometime today and how he planned to just power through until evening, but—

“Will you, too?”

“Of course.”

“Then, yeah. Okay.”

•

Soon after he tucks himself against Viktor’s chest, Yuuri slips into a deep sleep. The mattress of the guest bed is similar in size and firmness to the one they use in St. Petersburg, and after a week of sleeping in single beds and the guest futons in Hasetsu (Viktor’s king-sized bed being a long-abandoned part of the past), and their one tipsy night on the Paris hotel room’s memory foam mattress, it’s a comfort to curl up somewhere that feels like part of the home he’s made with Viktor over the last several months.

He doesn’t sink deep enough to dream. With his biggest fear assuaged, the littler anxieties link up together and begin to ferment.

•

Yuuri wakes in the dark feeling heavy and drugged, his body overtaxed and confused. A persistent ache throbs across the length of his back muscles and Viktor’s heart beats under his ear with the steadiness of a metronome. A soft exhale against his hair draws Yuuri’s attention to the silence in the rest of the apartment.

His mind refuses to juggle languages, so Yuuri sticks to Japanese. “What time is it?” Two slurred syllables in his efficient mother tongue and he’s done.

Viktor’s fond, “Two thirty in the morning,” is prompt and clear and in English, suggesting he either hasn’t slept yet or has been awake for a while.

The answer isn’t surprising enough to deserve an outward reaction—it _is_ dark and quiet—so Yuuri keeps his eyes closed. Viktor’s pectoral muscles under his cheek tense as Viktor lifts his head, and then Yuuri feels Viktor’s lips press a gentle, prolonged kiss against his hair. Once Yuuri makes a soft noise of acknowledgment and squeezes his arms around Viktor’s torso, Viktor lets out a breath of a laugh and relaxes back into the pillows.

“My poor Yuuri,” he says. “You missed dinner.”

Yuuri grunts. He tells himself there’s still a chance he could fall asleep again as long as he doesn’t fully activate the speech centers of his brain.

“Are you hungry?”

Yuuri grunts again.

“Horny?”

Yuuri whines low in his chest. He’s not, but that could easily change, and this very much isn’t the time or place for that, either.

Viktor’s grin is clear in his voice when he says, “Fine, fine. Go back to sleep. I love you.”

Yuuri answers with an ornery sound, but he kisses Viktor’s chest to undercut it a moment later. He drifts back under to the pleasant lavender sensations of Viktor’s fingertips massaging through his hair.

•

He doesn’t wake again until sunlight spears in through the window on the ceiling and warms his face. His fiancé lies beside him wearing one of the face masks Ilya talked about. His fiancé who, it should be mentioned, is out cold with a patch of saliva drying at the corner of his partially open mouth. 

When he’s sure Viktor won’t wake for a while, Yuuri pulls out of his arms and stretches out his sore back. He wakes up by degrees, his mind gaining in energy as he takes in the details of their room for the next several days. The bed occupies a third of the space up here, and the entire far wall is packed tight with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Yuuri wonders how often Viktor’s parents come up here and retrieve these books.

They never had many books at home when Yuuri was growing up. Yuuri’s mother reads historical romances sometimes and passes them on to Minako when she’s finished. They have a kind of two-person book club they keep trying to wrangle Mari into joining, but Mari prefers nonfiction and magazines about idols.

The idea of introducing his family to Viktor’s pummels into Yuuri’s gut like a stone. If this week goes well, it’ll be expected, won’t it? And it’ll have to be long before the wedding, that’s for sure. Yuuri’s cousin Tatsuya and his fiancé Sousuke waited until the day of their ceremony in Hawaii to introduce their parents, just assuming that they’d get along, and their lack of foresight led to one of the most explosive events in Katsuki family history. Yuuri was in Detroit when it happened, but he’s heard enough about it over the years to have internalized the implicit warning. Tatsuya himself once solemnly told Yuuri, “I’m a cautionary tale, Yuu-chan. They’re still mad about it. Learn from my pain.”

It’s difficult to imagine Viktor’s parents or Yuuri’s participating in the kind of fiasco that’s left an unbridgeable rift between Tatsuya’s parents and most of Sousuke’s family, but it also seems foolish to gamble by assuming.

Yuuri tucks his face against Viktor’s chest and inhales. It’s a shame Viktor seems personally offended by the idea of eloping. From the beginning of their discussions of the wedding, Viktor’s been determined to maximize the number of witnesses to their union, while Yuuri only dreams of limiting the bipedal guest list to single digits and increasing the number of dogs.

When his bladder sounds the most urgent of alarms, Yuuri makes quick, careful work of leaving the bed. The silence around him is so absolute that the simple act of unzipping his suitcase sounds like smashing a frying pan against the stair banister. Viktor’s parents didn’t point out where their room is, so that leaves Yuuri convinced that it must be directly beneath this room and any significant sound will wake them and irritate them and—his fingertips graze the coarse texture of his toiletries bag at last. Behind him, Viktor turns over and starfishes over the empty space Yuuri’s left with a sweet, happy noise that warms Yuuri’s whole chest.

In the bathroom, he considers a shower, but the thought of waking everyone with water rushing through the pipes leaves him cold with preliminary guilt, so he settles for brushing his teeth with the barest trickle from the faucet instead. The toilet is its own adventure in apprehension—but to Yuuri’s transcendent relief, flushing barely makes a sound, fresh water coasting from the rim over the porcelain and down the drain with only a whisper.

Yuuri has never before wanted to hug a toilet, especially one without a bidet, but he thinks his feelings are justified.

He glances at the pristine white hand towels folded next to the sink and wipes his hands on his pajama bottoms. When he returns to bed, Viktor is snoring and somehow taking up the entire circumference of the mattress. Yuuri grins and picks up Viktor’s arm with both hands to roll him onto his side. Viktor course-corrects just as Yuuri is lying down, coiling around Yuuri’s torso with a happy sigh.

“You took forever in there,” Viktor murmurs. He touches his lips to Yuuri’s neck and sighs through his nose with deep contentment.

Yuuri pulls Viktor’s arms higher.

“I’m not doing anything,” Viktor says.

Yuuri hums at a deliberately neutral pitch.

“ _Yuu_ ri.”

“I know you’re thinking about it,” Yuuri says.

“Of course I am,” Viktor says, smirking against Yuuri’s skin. “I’m sharing a bed with Katsuki Yuuri.”

“Shh!”

Viktor’s left hand steals over Yuuri’s chest, palming a stiff nipple through Yuuri’s shirt. “ _Yuu_ ri.”

“ _Vik_ tor.” Yuuri smacks his hand and rolls onto his side, not quite far enough to fully escape Viktor’s grasp.

Viktor clamps on and makes a sullen sound by Yuuri’s ear. “ _Yuu_ uu _uu_ ri.” Without giving Yuuri time to respond, Viktor rubs the groove of Yuuri’s hip and makes his case for very quiet sex. Yuuri counts backward from a hundred, knowing that if he loses focus, the part of himself that wants to say yes will win.

“Their bedroom is way over there,” Viktor says, sounding petulant. He’s probably pointing, but Yuuri doesn’t open his eyes to check. After a moment, Viktor correctly interprets Yuuri’s silence as indecision and sneaks his hand under Yuuri’s shirt to trail his fingertips over the small swell of Yuuri’s belly. “Besides,” Viktor adds, hot air pressing over Yuuri’s ear, “I know you’re good at being quiet.”

In Yuuri’s mind, there’s a twelve-year-old version of himself who has spent the last fifteen months paralyzed and speechless ever since Viktor stood up naked in Yuutopia’s bath. That version of Yuuri chooses now to reanimate and yell at top volume that if seeing Living Legend Viktor Nikiforov fully naked in his family’s hot spring didn’t kill him, having his _fiancé_ Viktor Nikiforov running his tongue over Yuuri’s earlobe and whispering truly filthy suggestions into Yuuri’s ear when Yuuri absolutely cannot respond to it is _guaranteed_ to.

“Viktor, _enough_ ,” Yuuri says with a hint of a whine. He shivers under Viktor’s hands and quickly adds, “I want to, but not now. _Definitely_ not here.”

Viktor groans, but at last he acquiesces and rolls onto his back, removing all physical contact from Yuuri. “Fine,” he says. “Then I’m going to take a shower.” His tone is so dripping with gleeful anticipation that there’s no confusion whatsoever between them as to what he’ll be doing in there. Yuuri stubbornly ignores how hungrily he fills out and firms up at the thought. He’s already calculating the hours it’s been since Viktor last brought him to orgasm.

Viktor springs out of bed with annoying dexterity and stretches his arms high over his head. Arched back, ass pushed out, head tilted against his bicep—

“ _Viktor_ ,” Yuuri says mournfully.

Viktor winks at him and leans down to kiss Yuuri’s forehead. “You could join me,” he purrs.

“No,” Yuuri says, at great personal sacrifice.

Viktor thumbs Yuuri’s bottom lip and studies his eyes with heat. “You’re sure?” he asks coyly in Russian.

Yuuri whimpers. He almost covers his lap with the blanket, but Viktor surely already knows he’s winning. Again. At the brink of giving in, Yuuri makes a tormented noise and dives under Viktor’s pillow. For good measure, he yanks up the blanket and cocoons his feverish, lust-addled body. His life is a cursed dream.

“Ah, well,” Viktor says. His footsteps on the cushioned floor recede, but in his jaunty, over-enunciated Japanese, he calls loudly over his shoulder, “You’re welcome to join me!”

Yuuri waits until Viktor’s laughter is safely sealed behind the bathroom door to reach down and give himself an earnest, apologetic squeeze.

•

Viktor may have no qualms about jerking off in the shower, but when it’s Yuuri’s turn, he calls together every iota of willpower within himself and abstains. He’s a guest in someone’s home, after all. Plus, giving in to his body’s demands after Viktor wound him up like this feels too much like letting him win. Yuuri shivers under cold water for a while and emerges from the bathroom with his teeth chattering. From the emptiness of the room, Yuuri assumes Viktor has already gone downstairs, so he dresses slowly to the sounds of oil sizzling and Ilya singing in what Yuuri thinks is French.

His insides start to freeze to match the outside.

As well as yesterday went, and as kind as Viktor’s parents seemed, that was their first meeting. Of _course_ everyone was on their best behavior.

He still doesn’t know anything concrete about them, or why Viktor looked so ill at ease during lunch. He seemed fine in bed, but that’s…not much of an indication. Viktor’s _always_ fine in bed.

Yuuri tucks his pajamas into the laundry sack Viktor’s already set up in the corner and peers over the banister into the sitting room below, wondering where Yelena and Viktor are. A pair of plush aquamarine slippers sit askew in front of the white sofa. It’s unclear who owns them and whether they’re planning on returning to retrieve them anytime soon. Ilya’s cheerful song segues abruptly into silence, then he calls out something in rapid-fire Russian. Yelena answers from somewhere unseen—outside, maybe?

Yuuri takes a seat on the guest bed and picks up his phone, keeping an ear out for Viktor’s voice as he checks his messages. None from Viktor, but plenty from Phichit. The most recent message is timestamped twelve minutes ago and reads: [Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuri!!!]

Intrigued, Yuuri opens the messaging app and studies the screenshot that precedes Phichit’s plaintive message. It’s a shot of Phichit’s latest Instagram video, and one of the usernames in the “likes” column has been fanatically underlined multiple times in electric green.

[Wow,] is all Yuuri can think of to write, which speaks volumes of the way his life has been impacted by the company he keeps nowadays.

[EXPLAIN THIS BEHAVIOR!!!] Phichit responds.

Yuuri writes back an honest, [I don’t think I can. You know him better than I do…]

In fact, Phichit knows almost everyone better than Yuuri does. Phichit’s the one who follows everyone’s social media activity, who draws people to him with hardly any effort, and rarely makes enemies because even when he’s at his worst, it’s _very_ difficult to stay angry with him. If Yuuri had to pin down Phichit’s biggest flaw, it’s that he doesn’t understand how the introverts in his life think, and it leads to problems like the one he’s having right now with Seung-gil.

Phichit’s response arrives accompanied by many, many crying emoji. [I’m going to Seoul for answers!]

Yuuri blinks. [Are you going to yell at him?]

[I’m not mad at him! I’m confused! He liked my video! He NEVER likes my stuff! He never likes ANYONE’S stuff! YOU KNOW WHAT HE’S LIKE, YUURI!!!]

[I don’t think he’s going to be any better with words if you ambush him in person.]

[You never know! It works with you! ;D]

Yuuri gives his phone a deadpan look and writes, [Phichit…]

Downstairs, Ilya calls, “Are you awake, Yuuri?”

He scrambles to do three things at once: shut off his screen, stand up, and call back, “Yes!” in English.

“Vitya and his mother are out in the garden if you want to join them!”

Yuuri pockets his phone as he heads down the stairs and smiles when he sees Ilya standing at the bottom. The man’s clothes today complement his wife’s tasteful style more closely than yesterday’s, but there are still hints of casual in his slouch and easy smile.

“Good morning, Yuuri!” He claps Yuuri’s shoulder once they’re on equal footing, just hard enough to sting. “If you will feel tired later, just try to power through, yes? We already finish to eat—you must be hungry, missing two meals!—but Vitya’s darling mother picks tomatoes, so if you like tomatoes, you’re in luck! That should be enough until dinner, right? Ha! I’m joking, I’m joking. So, if you will excuse me—” He slips into the bathroom, still chuckling, and shuts the door. His muffled voice continues, “I make lunch soon! Ask them what they want, will you, Yuuri?”

“Y-yes, sir.”

“Ilya!”

Yuuri considers repeating the excruciating experience of using his fiancé’s father’s first name and physically balks. As he hurries out the back door into the garden, his mouth opens in silent awe. The sight before him could be a finished illustration plucked from the desk of an overzealous Ghibli artist. The longer Yuuri stares, what appears at first to be chaos gradually reveals order. The vegetable garden is the obvious centerpiece, a wide square brimming with leaves and sprouts and swollen cherry tomatoes on vines, all protected by a thin wooden frame and glass walls. The surrounding plots are filled with flowers, some of which Yuuri doesn’t even recognize—vermilions and whites and magentas and soft blues among them. Above, lush vines twine around pastel green trellises, their fuchsia blossoms easily the size of Yuuri’s hand. Somewhere, hidden among the vegetation, a creek bubbles and birds chirrup to each other.

Viktor and his mother sit at a table tucked in the corner beside the dining room window, shaded by a bright, wide-brimmed cloth umbrella. Viktor’s eyes are already fixed on him, his chin resting in the bowl of his hand as his mouth spreads into a warm smile. Yuuri can’t help the besotted expression it calls from him, even when Viktor’s mother stops talking and glances over her shoulder.

“Oh, Yuuri, good!” She lifts her hand and gestures broadly. “Come, enjoy the spoils of our garden. The tomatoes are the best we’ve ever grown!”

Yuuri sits between them, his back to the wall of the house so he can keep the garden in sight. It’s the kind of project his father might spend his free time on, if he had any.

“You look well-rested,” Viktor says.

In fact, Yuuri would love nothing more than to rest his head on the table and go back to sleep, but he quirks a smile at him instead. He’d be more relaxed if _someone_ hadn’t been keying him up twenty minutes ago.

The tomatoes Ilya mentioned fill a basket in the center of the table, though it looks like Viktor and his mother have already made an impressive dent in them. Stems and strips of jagged tomato flesh cover the plates before them, and the sight of them makes Yuuri’s stomach twist with a plaintive gargle. Viktor’s mother sets a third plate down in front of him, grinning, and starts to load it with tomatoes and cucumber slices. “Do you have any allergies, Yuuri?” she asks. “Viktor says you like eating nothing but vegetables in the summer.”

Most of the softness that filled Yuuri’s heart when he saw Viktor’s smile bursts into smoke. Luckily for the health of his continued first impression, Yuuri’s too well-mannered to kick his fiancé under the table the way he might if he were _evil_ like him.

“No, I don’t have any allergies,” he says. Nothing he’d die from, at least. Probably. He hasn’t actually ever checked that out….

Viktor winks at him and it’s not nearly as irritating as it should be. Which is irritating on its own.

With Yuuri’s plate filled, Viktor’s mother picks up what must be the broken thread of their conversation. “So, on Thursday,” she says in English, “your father wants to drive to Lausane. I told him I’d talk to you about it.”

Yuuri meets Viktor’s eyes across the table as clips from American road trip movies and in-law movies clash and merge into very specific and terrifying scenarios in his head. Something about Yuuri’s ensuing expression prompts a smile from Viktor.

“I think we were mostly hoping to relax,” he says.

“That’s what I thought. His backup plan is probably taking you two on a day trip around the city.”

Viktor’s nose scrunches. “Why?”

His mother smiles, serene with a touch of amusement. “He has his favorite person in town. He wants to show off.” Yuuri wonders what she means—whether it’s Viktor who Ilya wants to show off to the town, or the town to Viktor.

Viktor’s hum sounds noncommittal, but the corner of his mouth twitches.

Yuuri has never quite been able to break the habit of murmuring gratitude for a meal in Japanese before he eats, even overseas, but something about the presence Viktor’s mother carries makes him hold his tongue. He doesn’t want to call unnecessary attention to himself, to one of the many obvious differences between him and Viktor. He bows his head a little as an inferior cultural substitute and bites eagerly into the first tomato.

“Have you taken Yuuri to the house?” Viktor’s mother asks.

Viktor bites into a tomato and reaches for a napkin to catch the red stripe on his chin. “No,” he says, muffled. He doesn’t offer anything more.

What house?

His mother’s expression shifts subtly, and Yuuri wonders why it feels like she’s making a conscious decision not to look at Yuuri.

Viktor crunches into a cucumber next and beams. “We should have brought Makkachin. She would love these.”

It’s not the smoothest way to cover over the odd wrinkle of tension in the air, but Yuuri decides to play along. “I’ve never seen her eat one.”

“That’s because I like them more than her,” Viktor says. “I’ll give her the world, but not my cucumbers.”

Viktor’s mother is smiling absently down at her watch before she raises her eyes to meet Yuuri’s. “I’m sorry, Yuuri. Vitya’s papa and I have an appointment to keep in the city after lunch, so you two will be on your own for a few hours until dinner. Is that all right? We tried to change the appointment, but it had to be today. We might be home earlier—it’s always difficult to tell how long these things will take.”

He has no idea what appointment she’s referring to, but Yuuri rushes to say, “Oh, it’s okay,” as earnestly as he can. The inadequacy of his choice in words gives Yuuri a familiar rush of envy toward Guang Hong. Even at nineteen, Guang Hong’s formal English is leagues above Yuuri’s, complete with posh British inflection and a thousand graceful, nuanced ways to accept an apology and return one of his own. Even Phichit’s English is scarily competent, considering he learned most of it alongside Yuuri in Detroit.

 _Extroverts_.

Viktor makes a pleased sound around his next tomato, his eyes sparkling. Once he’s swallowed, he says, “Excellent! I wanted to show Yuuri around the city anyway.”

His tone hovers in a dangerous area between casual and thrilled. So much so that Yuuri peeks at him with deep suspicion.

Viktor primly ignores him.

•

It is in no way a surprise that Yuuri was correct to be suspicious. An hour into their winding jog through and alongside the crowded sidewalks of Lyon, they arrive at the Parc De La Tête d’Or. Yuuri is drenched with sweat and regretting every single ounce of sugar and fat he’s taken in since they left Russia. July in southeastern France is _not_ July in St. Petersburg.

Viktor leads them to a wide concrete staircase overlooking a pond, already dotted with a variety of tourists. Yuuri spots the probable Americans among them immediately, in their T-shirts and jeans and sneakers, and he enjoys a moment of triumph when one of them shouts, “Christina, honey, don’t touch that!” to a small child chasing an annoyed duck.

Yuuri decides to stretch before he sits, well aware that all their long hours of traveling in cramped conditions recently has been testing the limberness of his muscles.

While Viktor uncaps his water bottle, Yuuri pulls his ankle against his backside and asks, “What house was your mother talking about?”

Viktor finishes off the remaining half of his water and exhales with a satisfied noise. “Mm, sorry, what did you say?” he replies in Russian.

Yuuri clasps his hands over his head, leans his torso far to his right, and gives Viktor a flat look.

There’s a flash of a moment in which Viktor’s expression shutters and Yuuri actually thinks Viktor will continue the charade of having not heard him. Then it passes and Viktor says, “They have a house in St. Petersburg.”

The trouble with a relationship between two people who communicate in their second language ninety percent of the time is that it can be unfair of one of them to assume a deeper meaning behind most word choices. Like Viktor using “they” instead of “we”, for example.

Still, Viktor’s English is…very good. It seems unlikely to Yuuri that he’d make a pronoun choice like that lightly. Doesn’t it?

“Who lives there?” Yuuri asks.

Viktor says, “I’m not sure,” and then, “Yuuri, let’s take a selfie!” with such dissonant tones of voice it screams _I don’t want to talk about it_.

They walk around the park together, hands loosely twined. Yuuri tells Viktor about Phichit’s earlier messages, and Viktor says, “Wow, will he really go to Seoul?” and Yuuri says, “No. Probably not. Actually, I have no idea.”

He realizes he hasn’t written back to Phichit since this morning and makes a mental note to do that…later. Sometime…soonish.

When he’s not preoccupied with this house thing.

He can’t pin down why it matters. It’s just another one of many small personal things Viktor’s brushed to the side over the year and change they’ve spent together, so what makes this so intriguing?

It might be, Yuuri thinks, that he’s finally comfortable enough to _push_ for the answers Viktor doesn’t want to give.

Unfortunately, pushing Viktor to answer questions he doesn’t want to give is not one of Yuuri’s skills.

They walk most of the way back to Viktor’s parents’ building, dodging tourists and locals with equal frequency. Viktor keeps one arm snug around Yuuri’s waist, and Yuuri secretly enjoys the wet warmth of Viktor’s sweat-soaked shirt against his skin.

Where Paris was mad with tourists, Lyon is only slightly less overwhelming for a person who grew up in rural Saga and spent most of his five years in Detroit in either his dorm or the rink. He trusts Viktor to get them back, but Viktor seems to be consulting and obeying his phone’s directions to the letter, tugging Yuuri close as they pass through more crowded areas.

It occurs to Yuuri to ask, “When was the last time you were here?”

With the mottled noises of traffic to their left and the mesh of languages and laughter all around them, Viktor’s, “Hmm?” seems slightly more genuine.

It’s his body language that gives Viktor away. Normally when he’s missed something Yuuri’s said, he’s quick to lean close and offer his ear. This time he keeps his distance, his eyes fixed on his phone with studied innocence.

Yuuri’s curiosity spikes.

•

Once they’re indoors, Yuuri decides to launch an attack from a new angle. When Viktor locks the front door behind them and says, “Would you like to shower first?” while toeing off his shoes, Yuuri makes note of how Viktor’s studiously avoiding making eye contact.

“Viktor…”

“I actually have some emails to answer, so—”

“ _Vik_ tor.”

His fiancé pouts. “What?”

Six months ago, when Yuuri still considered himself a guest and not someone who lives full-time in their apartment, he woke up every day with fierce pangs of wonder in his chest that, for the foreseeable future, he would see this brilliant and beautiful person next to him every morning for…a very long time at the very least.

Six months ago, he knew _when_ Viktor was dodging difficult issues, but he didn’t quite know how to deal with them.

Now, he has a better idea.

He cups the side of Viktor’s face in one hand and thumbs over the flushed, smooth skin over Viktor’s cheekbone. “I’ll shower first,” Yuuri says, and tugs Viktor’s head down to kiss his forehead.

He leaves it at that, and enjoys the sight of Viktor standing in the entryway slightly open-mouthed before he heads up the stairs to discard his sweat-soaked clothes.

•

Viktor’s parents, it turns out, were meeting with a new physical therapist.

“My last one was fantastic,” Yelena tells them over dinner, “but she moved back to Portugal with her wife and infant son. This new one is good, but I’m not sure yet if it’s a good fit. He’s a little difficult for me to read, especially since I’ve spent the last twenty years in the constant company of someone who wears his heart on his sleeve.”

Ilya appears at first not to have followed the rapid-fire English, chewing on his spinach without changing his expression. Then he catches Yuuri’s eye and, still otherwise expressionless, winks.

Yuuri grins back.

Tonight, Ilya’s prepared a feast of vegetables with glasses of wine, and Yuuri would suspect Viktor of orchestrating the sharp drop in empty calories on the table except that Viktor himself looks a little put out as he assembles a plate for himself from the available options.

The western side of the apartment, the round dining room in particular, gives even more of a luxurious feeling at night than it did in the daylight. The chandelier above glows with soft ambers and golds, and the city lights outside glitter red and white beyond the window. Yuuri wore his nicest outfit for the evening, even though he overheard Ilya whispering to Yelena about maybe going out somewhere nice tomorrow evening. The way Yelena coordinates her simple but stylish outfits makes even the button-up and cashmere vest Yuuri’s wearing seem borderline casual.

It doesn’t help that Viktor could wear nothing but a T-shirt and cut-off jeans and somehow appear like the height of fashion, and yet he’s also wearing clothes a cut above what he usually wears at home in St. Petersburg or Hasetsu. He seems to sense Yuuri looking at him and smiles, sneaking a hand under the table to lace their fingers for a few seconds.

Halfway through a broccoli and garlic dish that gives Yuuri flashbacks to last spring’s hellish diet, Yuuri hears Ilya say to Yelena in Russian, “If you don’t want it anymore, we could have one of the Rolls Royces shipped down instead.”

“It’s not that I don’t want it,” Yelena replies. “It’s just too tight and it’s rough on my knees when—”

Yuuri doesn’t realize he’s staring. He’s busy rewinding what he heard and trying to decide if he really heard _plural_ in regard to one of the most expensive car brands he knows.

Yelena notices and smiles at him. “Your Russian is stronger than you let on,” she says. It sounds like there should be a chiding note in her voice, but she mostly sounds amused.

Yuuri’s face burns and, as usually happens when he’s flustered, his English falls apart. “No, I didn’t—wasn’t— _ano_ , I—”

Ilya kindly pretends not to know why he’s embarrassed and tells Yuuri, “We try to gave a car to Vitya, but he says he, ah, doesn’t want them.”

“Rolls Royces are difficult to drive in the snow,” Viktor says.

Yuuri isn’t imagining the tiny smile lifting the corner of Viktor’s lips.

His flippant remark, however, sparks a passionate defense of the Rolls Royce from Ilya that quickly melts from flustered English back to breakneck-speed Russian, and Yuuri decides he’s going to focus on his broccoli, which is disappointing company but far safer.

The house.

Rolls Royce _s_.

Huh.

Well.

So they’re wealthy. That much was already obvious from the moment Yuuri saw the apartment’s interior, and it wasn’t like Yuuri’s never suspected as much based on Viktor’s clothes from back in his junior days. It’s not like it’s a _problem_ for Yuuri that Viktor’s family is well off, and he’s never given Viktor any reason to think that some financial disparity between their families would be something that bothers him, has he?

He might obsess a little over that until dinner ends.

Jetlag catches up with Yuuri around nine o’clock as Ilya and Yelena insist on carrying the dishes to the kitchen. Yuuri manages to carry exactly one plate to the sink before Ilya laughs and steers him by the shoulders into Viktor’s custody.

After that, Ilya heads to the sitting room to read on his tablet while Yelena rolls into the master bedroom to take off her jewelry and lie down for a bit. Left to their own devices for the time being, Viktor tugs Yuuri outside into the garden, now illuminated by small lights lining the pathways. They sit on a bench overlooking the square, and Viktor guides Yuuri’s head onto his shoulder.

“Do you want to go up to bed?” Viktor whispers in Japanese.

It makes Yuuri smile. He can’t be sure if Viktor means to do it, but recently Viktor has fallen into a trend of using Japanese when Yuuri’s especially tired. Conscious or not, Yuuri’s touched by the gesture. “It’s fine,” he murmurs. “I’ll try to stay awake. I missed a lot of yesterday, so I don’t want to be rude to your parents.”

“They probably won’t mind,” Viktor says.

Maybe it’s the Japanese, but there’s something odd about Viktor’s voice when he says that. As if he’s not sure himself how they’d feel if Yuuri went to sleep early for the second night in a row.

“I didn’t get to spend much time with them today,” Yuuri says, stubborn. “It would be rude.”

“It’ll be more rude if you yawn in their faces,” Viktor points out with amusement.

“Please stop talking,” Yuuri says.

Viktor laughs. Louder than he meant to, apparently, because he apologizes with a snug arm around Yuuri’s waist and a squeeze.

He’s so warm. He smells so good and so familiar.

Yuuri yawns, tempted into drifting off right here, and it’s only through stubbornness that he keeps his eyes open.

To force his mind to keep working, Yuuri asks, “How long have they lived here?”

Vitkor pauses. “In Lyon, or in France?”

“Either, I guess.”

Viktor’s silence is longer, and Yuuri again senses hints of a reluctant atmosphere.

Not for the first time, Yuuri wishes he had a friend like Phichit, but one slightly less bold and effervescent in social situations. He needs a good example of how to broach difficult subjects with Viktor without it leading to screaming and crying, and Yuuri just can’t pull off Phichit’s style of bubbly enthusiasm.

Granted, he and Viktor have managed _not_ to do screaming and crying ever since that night in Barcelona, but it’s not because they’ve gotten any better at communicating. They just haven’t been put in a situation like that since.

And since Yuuri _really_ doesn’t enjoy situations like that, he’s got to be careful with this potentially explosive one.

Families can be tumultuous. Just ask Yuuri’s cousin.

So while Viktor’s definitely hiding something, Yuuri struggles to keep his tongue _and_ prevent his mind from fabricating the worst possible scenarios.

The forever young part of Yuuri that once passionately defended Viktor in various internet forums as a feisty anonymous teenager tries to excuse Viktor’s reticence. Clearly, Viktor isn’t used to talking about his family. Why would he? He never talks to the press about them—Yuuri would know—and everyone else Viktor keeps close to him has probably met his family and doesn’t venture on lengthy conversations about them with him. Yakov doesn’t seem like the type to make small talk about Viktor’s relatives, and the rest of the skating club don’t exactly chat with Viktor on the level of equals.

But the part of Yuuri who expected Viktor to be his stability on this trip is annoyed.

What did Viktor expect, exactly? For Yuuri to ask no questions at all about his parents while they were here? To spend every day sleeping until noon, going on jogs in the park, and participating in nothing deeper than shallow small talk with his parents?

 _Actually, that sounds pretty wonderful,_ thinks the part of Yuuri who is always very, very tired.

“They moved here about eighteen years ago,” Viktor says. “This apartment, maybe four years ago.”

Yuuri forms his next question— _Where did_ you _live?_ —just as Yelena pushes the door open and says, “Would you like some wine, boys? We’re about to watch The Sound of Music if you’d like to join us.”

•

It would appear on the surface that the story behind several of Viktor’s exhibition pieces is that Yelena and Ilya vehemently love Broadway musicals. The sitting room they’re in features several framed posters of various productions Yuuri recognizes, with indecipherable black signatures covering the text and images. Ilya is quick to tell Yuuri that his favorite musical is Into the Woods, while Yelena is partial to West Side Story. They’re kind enough not to ask Yuuri what his is, and Yuuri thanks the universe because the only other title that obediently rises to his mind’s surface is The King and the Skater (and its sequel).

In the spirit of continuing the conversation, Yuuri volunteers the information that he’s only seen a few musicals in his life, all of them on DVD. When they hear that The Sound of Music isn’t one of them, they beam at him with eager anticipation.

In that moment, both of them are almost identical to their son, who’s smiling affectionately against the lip of his wine glass.

While the opening score plays, Yelena parks her chair beside the sofa and eases herself from one to the other using the table and Ilya’s thigh for balance. Viktor tugs Yuuri onto the loveseat with him, on the far side from his parents, and drapes his arm around Yuuri’s neck.

Yuuri laces their fingers together against the curve of his own shoulder and tries not to melt when Viktor hums along quietly with the opening number.

The story is pretty much what Yuuri expected from years of the occasional reference or snippet in Detroit, and he’s able to follow along with the English dialogue better than he expected to, thanks to the subtitles Ilya apologetically switches on a few minutes into the first scene.

Maria has just become governess to the von Trapp children when Viktor excuses himself to use the restroom. Yelena quickly pauses the movie, and at long, long last, talk of Viktor’s childhood springs forth.

She tells Yuuri that Viktor’s childhood was crammed with trips to the theater. “When Vitya was six years old,” Yelena says, her eyes gleaming with tipsy mirth, “we took him to see CATS in New York.”

Yuuri, as both Viktor Nikiforov’s diehard fan and Viktor’s doting partner, _needs_ to hear every single word of this, so he leans hard on the arm of the loveseat and devotes his full and hungry attention to Viktor’s mother.

“We had seats on the wings of the stage,” Yelena continues while Ilya starts to chuckle. “It was dressed up to look like part of the junkyard set, and the actors would sometimes come up and interact with the audience. Vitya’s favorite—”

“Oh, _please_ no,” Viktor sighs from the doorway.

“Shh!”

“Yuuri’s right, Vitya, shush,” Yelena says. “Viyta’s favorite cat was the black and white magic one, and during one of the numbers, the actor invited Vitya to dance with him. Oh, I wish we’d had smartphones back then! It was so cute. Vitya was already taking ballet lessons—they all looked so surprised that he could keep up with professional dancers! And he knew all the choreography for that song, too!”

Yuuri immediately looks to his left where Viktor is sitting with his arms folded. Viktor hides his foul-looking grimace behind a curtain of bangs.

“I don’t remember you skating to any CATS songs,” Yuuri observes innocently.

Viktor shoots him a scowl, at which Yuuri—prideless after months of Katsuki Hiroko shattering every ounce of it by showing Viktor every single family photo of the Yuuri Proudly Posing Beside Various Incarnations of Viktor Nikiforov variety—serves back a smile and a wink.

Ilya shares in Yelena’s laughter, then levers himself off the sofa, picks up the wine bottle from the table, and walks over to replenish Viktor and Yuuri’s wine glasses. Yuuri tries to refuse on the grounds that he’s only taken two sips. Maybe three. Wait, four. More? While he’s counting, Ilya shrugs and adds a splash into his glass.

Yuuri lets his eyes travel around the room to test if he’s still operating in a state of relative sobriety. He doesn’t exactly know how this is going to prove anything, but Phichit swears by it for some reason. Or is that for seasickness? No, that’s Yuri who gets seasick. No, wait. Yuri’s the one who gets airsick. Right?

“We should watch CATS tomorrow night!” Yelena says, holding her glass out to Ilya as he returns to her side.

He shakes the bottle to indicate that it’s empty and her small pout is so reminiscent of Viktor that Yuuri says, “Vitya, you look a lot like your mother.”

He’s definitely drunk, because he didn’t mean to say that out loud.

Nor does he mean to say or do anything he says and does afterward.

He certainly, absolutely doesn’t mean to conclude the evening by falling asleep on Viktor’s shoulder with his mouth open and a string of drool staining Viktor’s shirt.

•

So naturally, it’s _this_ night that—out of all of the drunken nights that have been wiped clean from his mind—Yuuri remembers with perfectly humiliating clarity.

For starters:

1) _How many times has he called Viktor_ Vitya _while drunk?_

2) …Oh. Oh no….

•

“I’m not going down there,” Yuuri tells the depths of a pillow.

Viktor, still sweet-scented from his shower, combs his fingers through Yuuri’s hair. “I’m sure they don’t remember it as well as you do,” he says, horribly chipper.

From the dim lighting in the guest room, the sky must be overcast. Though a kindness for Yuuri’s hangover, it’s not especially helpful in regard to sorting out what time of day it is. Viktor woke him a few minutes ago, and Yuuri’s poor dehydrated, pain-addled brain caught the full force of his memories from the evening before.

“I didn’t even know I _knew_ ‘Memory,’” Yuuri complains. “Why was I singing it to your mother? I’m going back home. Divi-disen—agh. What’s the— _distract_ your parents.”

“Oh, my Yuuri, how I love you,” Viktor says with a sigh.

There’s something wicked to his sweet sigh that tells Yuuri to feel alarmed. “You didn’t—”

“What? Take a video of you singing for my parents and upload it online?” Viktor makes a clucking noise with his tongue. “ _Yuu_ ri, I’m not that callous. I’m not _Phichit_. I wouldn’t just upload a video of you without telling you.”

“What does that word mean?” Yuuri groans. “Don’t use words I don’t know when my head hurts.”

“What, ‘callous’? Mean, basically. But—more. Like, eh, what’s the word in Japanese… _akuma?_ ”

“…Devil?”

“No. Well. Sort of. It’s an adjective.”

“‘Devil’ is a…” —thing. _That_ thing— “…noun.” Right. That thing. “So is _akuma_.”

“No, I meant ‘callous’ is an adjective.”

Yuuri gives up. He doesn’t remember what they were talking about anyway. He _does_ remember crying in the middle of singing “Memory” to his fiancé’s mother, though.

He says, “Right, sure,” in Japanese and burrows his face deeper into what he thinks is Viktor’s pillow. Maybe if he wants it enough, he’ll die here and be reborn as something too smart to imbibe alcohol.

“I’m going to go watch my father practice painting our family crest in the garden. Feel free to join us, or my mother in the sitting room, when you’re feeling better.” Viktor’s warm, soft lips touch the back of Yuuri’s neck.

The sensation is just pleasant enough to cut through the haze of sour pain for Yuuri to absorb the meaning of Viktor’s words and realize—

“You have a family crest?”

Viktor’s quiet for a moment. “You don’t?” he asks. “Doesn’t everyone?”

Yuuri turns his head sideways and frowns up at Viktor. “I…I don’t know. I think mine does. Our family’s records were kept in a temple that burned down, so we only have family records for three…um. Generations. Two? Something like that. Anyway, my grandfather tells everyone we have, like, noble ancestors. No one believes him."

Viktor kisses Yuuri’s forehead with satisfaction. “I believe him. My Yuuri’s a prince.”

It calls up Yuuri’s first genuine smile of the day.

Then Viktor pushes himself off the bed and says, “If you’re not downstairs in an hour, I’m posting the video,” with a wink.

Yuuri squawks.

It isn’t until Viktor’s halfway down the stairs that Yuuri calls out, “Devil!” and Viktor laughs with utter aristocratic levity.

•

The next several hours are spent in relative quiet, at a leisurely pace that’s obviously been set for Yuuri’s benefit. Ilya paints in the garden, Yelena waters the plants around him, Viktor makes unhelpful comments about his father’s color choices, and Yuuri sits in a chair near the three of them and sheepishly refills his water glass over and over from the massive water pitcher on the table by his elbow.

Viktor stops teasing him about the video by lunchtime, but he refuses to delete it on the grounds that Yuuri’s singing voice is “angelic and worthy of preservation”—and when Yelena agrees with Viktor, Yuuri decides he can’t fight both of them on it and gives up.

It’s then he realizes that he’s been so distracted by his predicament all morning that he’s forgotten all about Viktor’s odd behavior yesterday.

He isn’t being odd now, though. Just…annoyingly smug and endearingly fond at the same time.

After lunch, Ilya leaves to run some errands and Yuuri, in an attempt to steer the conversation permanently away from his drunken exploits, asks Yelena, “Is painting his hobby?” with a nod to the canvas in the garden behind them.

“Ah!” she says. “Yes. He picked it up recently. His parents were painters, and they tried to get him to practice when he was a child, but he was a contrary little boy and refused. A few years ago he discovered that he quite likes it, and since he’s retired now—well.” She smiles and lifts a hand in a sort of gestural ellipsis.

The three of them turn together to observe the painting through the open garden doorway. It doesn’t resemble much of anything yet—despite the hours he’s claimed to have worked on it, it’s still mostly a mesh of colors over a faint outline.

Yuuri—who spent most of the morning concentrating on looking two shades healthier than corpselike—finally notices the Cyrillic script at the bottom of the canvas and frowns. That…doesn’t say “Nikiforov.” Yuuri’s sure of it. He memorized how to write Viktor’s full name in Cyrillic when he was thirteen, and he definitely still has the notebook in his closet somewhere. (He reminds himself sternly to vacuum-seal, box, and bury that notebook somewhere laughably remote at the earliest possible opportunity, along with the notebook in which Yuuri spent sixteen looseleaf pages trying out various kanji for Viktor’s name, then used the following _forty_ pages to practice writing it out in fancy ways instead of doing his calligraphy assignments.)

Before Yuuri’s brain can catch up with his mouth, he says, “That’s not—”

Yelena smiles at him with an encouraging, interrogative tilt of her head.

Viktor drops his chin into the palm of his hand and grins with full Cheshire innocence. “Yes, Yuuri?” he purrs.

Suspecting a trap, but unwilling to back out of it, Yuuri pulls his gaze away from Viktor and asks Yelena, “Why doesn’t it say ‘Nikiforov’…?”

Yelena visibly takes a few seconds to register his question. Then she widens her eyes at Yuuri, turns her head a few degrees, and presents Viktor with even wider eyes. “ _Vitya!_ ”

“Nikiforov isn’t my last name,” Viktor says, amused.

Yuuri stares at him. At this point, Viktor could tell him they keep leopards as pets and he wouldn’t question it. “Eh?”

Viktor puts his finger to his lips and grins. “Mm. It is legally, of course, but it isn’t the name I was born with. Nikiforov is a kind of stage name I made to protect my family’s privacy.”

Yelena reaches across the table to smack Viktor’s arm. “Don’t tease your fiancé.”

“I’m not!” Viktor laughs. “He never asked.”

Yelena makes a sharp noise with her tongue. “Go wash the dishes, you wily little fox.”

Yuuri repeats, “ _Eh?_ ” this time directly at Viktor and with a little more force.

Viktor stands, gathers the plates from the table, and offers Yuuri a parting smile with the tip of his tongue poking out impishly as he leaves the room.

The sound of whistling follows shortly afterward, and Yuuri wishes—not for the last time—that surprising people wasn’t one of Viktor’s favorite hobbies.

Yelena gives Yuuri an exasperated look that he empathizes with all the way down to his bones.

“I think he's only being half fox,” she says, casting a glance over her shoulder where the rush of a running faucet has begun. “He doesn’t always have the same sense of priorities that others do. It _is_ his last name. Ever since he was ten years old.”

Yuuri opens his mouth and closes it before the question “is he the only one with that last name?” and the words “that sounds lonely” become part of yet another spoken memory he lives to regret.

“When he decided to enter figure skating,” Yelena continues, “we thought it would be best to keep his public image separate from his family name for his safety.”

Yuuri nods, frowning as a distant memory shakes loose. “I think it was in the tabloids,” he says. “Some paper said that ‘Nikiforov’ might not really be his last name and—” How had the paper phrased it? _The same platinum hair and jawline of the noble_ something _line._ Yushakov? Yushasomething.

“I wasn’t a fan of the name he picked,” Yelena continues, apparently unaware of the inner turmoil going on in Yuuri's mind. "Do you know what ‘Nikiforov’ means?”

Yuuri nods absently. He spent hours trying to choose appropriately grandiose Japanese characters for it.

Yelena nods, throwing her hand up in a _see?_ gesture, her smile warm. “He’s always been a little exuberant,” she says.

On cue, Viktor starts singing “Magical Mr. Mistoffelees” in the kitchen.

•

After Yelena retires to her bedroom for a midday nap, Yuuri darkens the doorway of the kitchen and glowers at Viktor’s back until Viktor senses it and glances over his shoulder.

“Wow, what a face,” Viktor says, laughing.

Yuuri points at him, dismally aware that Viktor's not getting the full impact of how rude this would be in Japan. “You,” he says firmly, “sit.”

Viktor's eyes flash with mischief and something more seductive, but Yuuri refuses to be distracted.

Viktor shuts off the faucet and dries his hands before taking a seat at the kitchen island, his arms folded primly before him. “Yes, darling?”

“Don't ‘darling’ me,” Yuuri says, ignoring the wash of heat that pours through him just hearing the word. “Stop letting me get blindsided. I know you think it's funny, but I'm only one more surprise from cardiogenic shock.”

Viktor’s eyebrows launch up. “I think your English has surpassed mine,” he says.

“I looked it up the week you came to Hasetsu,” Yuuri says dryly.

“Research,” Viktor says, tilting his head until his fringe spills over his eye. “Sexy.”

“Focus,” Yuuri says, more for himself than Viktor. “Is there anything else you’re not telling me about your family?”

Viktor pouts. “Yuuri, I'm hurt that you think I find your distress amusing.”

Yuuri makes an unconvinced noise.

“You win, love,” Viktor says, with an elegant yet conciliatory tilt of his head. “We’re nobility.”

Yuuri makes his face match the noise he just made.

“What! You don’t believe me?”

“No,” Yuuri says, flat.

Viktor props his chin in his hand and smiles sappily at him. “That’s because my Yuuri is clever.”

“Is the house in St. Petersburg haunted?” Yuuri asks. “Who lives there? Why don’t you live there?”

Viktor shrugs. “It has too many stairs for Makkachin,” he says.

“…That’s it?”

Viktor frowns. “What do you mean, ‘that’s it’?”

Yuuri boosts himself onto the stool beside Viktor’s. He’s Very Tired all of a sudden. “I’m going to take a nap,” he says, and puts his head down on his folded arms.

At least Viktor starts massaging the back of his neck, even if he’s laughing while he does it. “To be perfectly honest,” Viktor muses, “it didn’t occur to me that you'd care about these things.” He sounds almost sheepish. “I thought you were more nervous about my parents as people, so I tried to focus more on that part.”

“You didn't even tell me anything about them!” Yuuri retorts, muffled, into his arms.

Viktor lifts both hands helplessly. “What did you want me to tell you? They’re...nice.” Yuuri lifts his head a bit and eyes Viktor until he drops his hands.

It’s clear the instant Viktor drops his pretenses, and Yuuri’s almost surprised by how quickly the atmosphere between them has changed from lighthearted to almost solemn.

“My mother had her accident when I was eight and they moved here when I was ten. I stayed in St. Petersburg with Yakov and Lilia until I was old enough for my own place. I’ve never really...gotten to know my parents as people. They came to watch me when I skated, and we wrote emails back and forth. They’re just...my parents. They’re good people.”

It’s all delivered so perfunctorily, and Yuuri tries to remember if he's ever seen Viktor look so lost, as if what he’s just said sounds strange even to himself.

“It isn’t as sad as it sounds,” Viktor says. “They visited. I visited. I wasn't unhappy.”

The defensive note in his voice is what pushes Yuuri to say, “I know,” and reach for Viktor’s hand.

He thinks of the Viktor he watched as a junior skater, already bright-eyed and charming for even the most sudden appearances of reporters and television cameras. And right behind Viktor’s shoulder, or just off-camera (according to fan reports) was Yakov, expression impenetrable or grumpy—never deviating into any other mode.

It’s in Yuuri’s heart to ask questions about Viktor’s upbringing, to wonder how things worked out as they did, and why Viktor sometimes clings so hard to Yuuri, as if he’s amazed Yuuri will let him.

Viktor laces their fingers but avoids his eyes. “They really are good people,” he says again.

“They are,” Yuuri agrees, and means it. “I’m sorry, Vitya. I didn't know…” _that you don’t know them either._

•

It doesn’t feel like the right time to say more, so Yuuri kisses Viktor’s knuckles and promises silently that he believes him.

•

The scene in the sitting room that greets Yelena and Ilya later that afternoon when naps and errands have been seen to, is their son Viktor and his fiancé Yuuri surrounded by stacks of VHS tapes labeled in some way or another with—at minimum—Viktor’s name, age, and competition title. Viktor is in the middle of regaling Yuuri with The Tale of Makkachin’s Poorly Timed Leash Liberation—definitely one of the more famous family legends, not to mention one during which Yakov still has to walk out of the room.

Neither parent interrupts the story. Ilya sits on the arm of the loveseat, chuckling, and Yelena locks the wheels of her chair near one particularly tall stack of video tapes in case it gets any ideas about tumbling over.

When Viktor reaches the part about Makkachin careening onto the ice, all uncoordinated puppy enthusiasm at seeing Viktor warming up in the center, all four of them share in the laughter, connected by their love for one effervescent standard brown poodle.

After the story, Viktor explains to his parents that he wanted to show Yuuri some of his earliest competitions, and he found the VHS tapes in a very clearly labeled box under the stairs.

Ilya retrieves the VHS player from even deeper in the storage space, and Yelena makes tea. She pats the dust from Ilya’s clothes when he returns triumphant with his spoils.

This newly-assembled family gather on the sofa together, Ilya serving tea, Yelena bracing her legs on a pillow on the table, and Viktor tucking himself against Yuuri’s side with rare serenity in his eyes.

•

That night, before Yuuri falls asleep in the guest bed of his future in-laws’ apartment, he kisses Viktor’s nose and whispers, “We’re a good family,” against his fiancé’s ear.

He echoes back the open smile Viktor shows him.

**Author's Note:**

> [This](https://www.barnes-lyon.com/en/luxury-real-estate/lyon-69002/flat/flat-lyon-2eme-297) is the place I was picturing for his parents. Snazzy, right? :D/
> 
> [Twitter](https://twitter.com/hadakanomind) | [Tumblr](http://kyashin.tumblr.com/)


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